That fact that projection screens have emerged as a subject of hot debate might make the general public question the sanity of A/V aficionados. After all, these are flat white sheets we’re talking about, right? Are we as nuts as oenophiles who enthuse about aromas of freshly reaped alfalfa in their pinots?

The subject of screens has certainly become more complicated. As projectors (and therefore screens) have become more practical and popular, more companies have entered the market. And where once screens seemed as uniformly white as the outfits at Wimbledon, we now have gray screens and even black screens. We have woven screens. We have ultrawide screens and curved screens. And a screen might cost a few hundred dollars or tens of thousands of dollars.

That’s why Sound & Vision decided to do its first major projection-screen roundup. We borrowed some of the most interesting offerings from today’s leading manufacturers, ran all of them through a series of measurements, then spent weeks swapping them out, watching movie after movie to figure out what everyone really needs to know about this newly complicated category.

Gain: Good or Evil?

There’s a surprising amount of technical stuff going on with screens, but if you understand the concept of gain, you’re halfway there — and you’ll be deep into one of the most controversial subjects in video. Gain is the amount of light a screen reflects back at you. A matte white surface is said to have a gain of 1.0. ( A piece of printer paper comes close to that.) A screen with a gain greater than 1.0 focuses and intensifies light, while a screen with a gain less than 1.0 diminishes it.

Gain can produce a brighter image, but today’s fixed-pixel (DLP, LCD, and LCoS) projectors are so powerful that brightness is seldom a concern. Gain is still important, though, because of its side effect: directionality.

In order to push a screen’s gain past 1.0, the manufacturer has to coat it with something that increases the directionality of the light reflecting back. That means the reflected light is most intense if you’re directly in front of the screen, and decreases as you move to the side. Here is where most of the controversy about screens lies.

Directionality can be a bad thing because it can result in “hot-spotting,” in which the center of the screen looks brighter than the corners. Purists hate that. But directionality can also be a good thing, because it lessens the reflection of light off your walls. If your walls and ceiling are painted, say, white or beige, light from the screen will reflect off of them, and some of it will end up back on the screen. This reduces contrast. Also, if your walls are painted any color other than white, gray, or black, that color will reflect back onto your screen and mess up your color accuracy.

As you’ve probably noticed from the installations featured in Sound & Vision, most home theaters don’t have dark gray walls. So gain has a practical advantage in a typical home theater environment: It lends the interior designer greater creative freedom without adversely affecting the picture.

Still More Issues?

Yep. For one, there’s gray screens versus white screens. Gray screens were introduced back in the day when no fixed-pixel projector could deliver deep blacks. By darkening the screen, you also darken the blacks. Of course, you’re also darkening the whites, but you don’t notice it because your eye sees them in contrast to the darkened blacks.

There’s one more issue, too: acoustical transparency. Many home theater designers like to put the center speaker — or even all three front speakers — behind the screen. Perforated screens for home theaters have been available for years, but some feel that a woven screen offers superior acoustic transparency. Most woven screens have a black fabric backer behind the screen to increase contrast and prevent the speakers behind the screen from showing through.

Both perforated and woven screens can create moiré patterns, which are caused by interaction of the perforations or weave with the pixel patterns of projectors. But skewing the material a bit in the screen frame usually fixes this. (Most screen companies now promise that customers will have no moiré problems with their perf or woven screens.)

Screen Testing

Six manufacturers agreed to loan us screens for evaluation: Da-Lite, Elite Screens, Screen Excellence, Screen Innovations, Screen Research, and Stewart Filmscreen. Because Cinemascope-style 2.35:1 video projection is the hottest thing going in high-end home theater, we decided to ask for 2.35:1 screens measuring roughly 106 inches wide.

I got three white woven screens, one more-or-less white solid screen, one gray screen, and one black screen.

To evaluate the screens, I measured the gain at the center and in each of the four corners to see how consistent it was; poor consistency indicates a tendency toward hot-spotting. I measured the half-gain angle of each screen — that is, the angle at which a screen’s gain falls to half the on-axis gain. ( With the equipment I had, this was unmeasurable on the white screens.) I measured each screen’s color response to see if it reflects all colors evenly. I measured the difference in audio response caused by the acoustically transparent screens, on-axis and at 30° off-axis. Then I spent a couple of weeks watching movies and TV shows on them.

To provide a close-to-perfect working environment for the screens, I created a “black hole” in my home theater lab — a space where the screens would confront as little influence from their surroundings as possible. I painted the walls behind and to the sides of the screens black, placed a piece of black industrial carpet on the floor, and stapled a matte-finish black fabric to the ceiling. This gave me a 6-foot-deep black zone—not perfect, but better than I’ve ever seen in a real home theater. To evaluate the screens’ performance in non-ideal conditions, I hung beige drapes on the sides of the black hole and used my Lutron GrafikEye dimming system to provide four different preset lighting levels.

I used JVC’s DLA-HD750 projector as the light source for all of my testing. In order to fill the 2.35:1 screens during my subjective viewing sessions, I added a Panamorph UH480 anamorphic lens.

The Results

The performance differences among these screens are subtle. At a comfortable viewing distance of 13 feet away, I could barely tell the difference between the various white screens, even though I could easily measure differences. And although I measured variances in the sonic effects of the woven screens, all I could really hear with any of them was a mild roll-off in the upper treble.

Da-Lite JKP Affinity

Most of today’s conventional screens are coated with a material that has visible grain. Video guru Joe Kane (the “JK” in =JKP) says this grain creates interference with the tiny pixels of 1080p projectors. For the JKP Affinity screen, Da-Lite uses a coating it claims is so fine it can’t interact with pixel patterns. The material is just very slightly gray, with a gain of 0.9. A motorized model is planned, and models with motorized masking for different aspect ratios are available. A 106-inch wide 2.35:1 model costs $2,418.

I measured the JKP Affinity’s actual gain at 0.95. Brightness dropped considerably in the corners for a near-white screen, by an average of 22%. On-axis color response was practically perfect. But the measurements don’t reveal the magic of watching a neutral screen like this in a black-hole environment. The picture seemed to float in space, as it does in a commercial cinema, but even better. The combination of the JKP Affinity screen, the JVC projector, and the Panamorph lens drew me into the action like never before.

Was this the magic of Da-Lite’s fine-grain coating, or just the effect of a screen without gain? To find out, I borrowed something similar to the JKP Affinity: Stewart’s StudioTek 100 1.0-gain screen. The Da-Lite did seem to convey slightly more detail, but the StudioTek’s brightness was more uniform across the screen. (I n fact, it was essentially perfect.) Performance differences between the two made it impossible to match the white and black levels for a fair comparison. In the end, the pictures looked a little different, but neither looked consistently better than the other. In the black hole, they both looked better than everything else I tested.

$2,418 (as tested) / da-lite.com

Elite Screens AcousticPro1080

A 103-inch 2.35:1 version of Elite Screen’s AcousticPro1080 comes in at a mere $1,342, making it the least - expensive woven screen we’ve encountered.

The rated gain of the AcousticPro1080 material is 1.0; I measured it at 0.67. Brightness uniformity was excellent — in fact, the gain increased in the corners by an average of 5%. Color shift on-axis was mild, with a very slight emphasis on green. Its audio response measured +1.9/–10.3 dB on-axis and +1.3/–5.0 dB off-axis. The measurement is essentially flat below 8 kHz, and that –10.3 dB dip is narrow, so acoustically it’s at least the equal of its more expensive competitors.

The screen looked good at 13 feet. I suspect that only a very serious videophile would consider this a step down from models costing much more. But at 3 or 4 feet, I could see thin red-and-green vertical moiré patterns in bright areas of the picture. Zooming in or out a bit fixed the problem — it seems I just happened upon the one image size at which this material doesn’t work well with the JVC projector. Elite Screens’ rep said the company had never experienced the problem with DLP and LCD projectors.

$1,342 (as tested) / elitescreens.com

Screen Excellence Enlightor 4K

The pixels of the new ultra-high-resolution 4K projectors are even smaller than the threads in a typical woven projection screen. Only a handful of 4K projectors even exist, yet Screen Excellence has already addressed this problem with its Enlightor 4K material, which looks more like a fine fabric than like a typical woven screen. It’s available only in a fixed frame; the package costs $3,595 in a 106-inch-wide 2.35:1 size. Motorized masking is available, as is a curved frame.

At 0.76, the Enlightor 4K’s gain measured lower than its stated gain of 0.98. But its brightness uniformity was superb, with an average gain increase of 4% in the corners. Color response was essentially flat. Acoustically, it measured +2.4/–9.0 dB on-axis, +0.2/–6.9 dB off-axis — comparable to the peaks and dips I measured for the Screen Research screen  — but the Enlightor 4K also diminished the treble by 2 to 3 dB between 1.5 and 8.5 kHz.

The Enlightor 4K’s finely woven material appealed to the perfectionist videophile in me. While I can’t say its picture looked noticeably better at a distance than those of the other woven screens, it definitely looked better close up. It was the only woven screen that could resolve the JVC projector’s pixel pattern. I imagine that with a 4K projector, the difference would be even more dramatic.

$3,595 (as tested) / screenexcellence.com

Screen Innovations Black Diamond II

Screen Innovations was one of the first to come out with a so-called “black” screen. Black screens are highly directional — they reflect only light coming straight at them, and reject light coming from an angle. This characteristic lets you watch them even in a well-lit room. The Black Diamond II that I received had a rated gain of 1.4 (It’s also available in 0.8) and costs $3,297 in a 106-inch-wide 2.35:1 size. A curved version is available, and Screen Innovations is working on a motorized version. The company contends that the screen’s dark surface eliminates the need for masking.

The Black Diamond II’s gain measured 1.24, and gain fell considerably in the corners, by an average of 43%. The half-gain angle was roughly 35°. Its color response was a bit uneven — it bumped up blue a tad and red a tad more, but my eyes didn’t notice the shift.

I got a huge kick out of this screen. It’s fun and relaxing to be able to watch a big picture (especially one in 2.35:1 aspect ratio) with the lights on. Room light can cause glare on the screen, but shutting off or moving the offending light fixes the problem. The Black Diamond II’s picture never achieves anything like the purity of the JKP Affinity, but it looks punchy, colorful, and contrasty all the same. This screen doesn’t really even compete with the others — it competes more with flat-panel TVs.

$3,297 (as tested) / siscreens.com

Screen Research ClearPix2

Screen Research was the first company to make a big splash with woven screens, and its products show significant refinement since their original introduction. The ClearPix2 fabric is certified by both the Imaging Science Foundation (ISF) and THX, and its FastGrip feature eliminates the creasing and bumps that have frustrated installers of woven screens.

The ClearPix2 sample we received featured a black-velvet-covered frame, a matte-white finish, and a rated gain of 0.95. It’s also available in a 0.75-gain gray finish and in a motorized roll-up configuration. Price of a 106-inch-wide 2.35:1 model is $4,543. Measured gain was lower than expected at 0.71, but brightness uniformity was good, with the gain increasing by an average of 8% in the corners. Color response on-axis was excellent. Acoustic performance was the best I measured, at +3.3/–7.1 dB on-axis and +3.3/–5.5 dB off-axis, and with a largely flat response below 8 kHz.

The ClearPix2 produced a pleasing image with the JVC projector and Panamorph lens. A macro shot revealed that the lines between the JVC’s pixels were lost in the weave, but the picture didn’t seem to lose detail as a result. Overall, this is a well-made and effective screen.

$4,543 (as tested) / screenresearch.com

Stewart Filmscreen FireHawk G3

The FireHawk G3 is the only gray screen I tested. It’s available in fixed-frame and motorized versions, in Stewart’s CineCurve curved screen, and with or without perforations and motorized masking. The 106-inch-wide 2.35:1 model I tested costs $2,600, and the price is the same no matter which Stewart material you choose. The screen is certified by both the ISF and THX.

I measured the gain at 1.07, lower than Stewart’s published number of 1.25. This screen is definitely directional — the gain falls by an average of 67% in the corners. It dropped to half-gain at about a 28° angle. Color response on-axis was almost perfectly even.

I also measured a piece of Stewart’s Microperf X2 screen material to compare it with the woven screens. The perf material did have a more pronounced effect on the sound than did the woven screens, measuring +4.1/–12.1 dB on-axis, +11.5/–5.8 dB off-axis when I used the Cinema Sonic Processor electronic compensator that Stewart offers with its perf screens. (The processor simply boosts treble by 3 dB.) But all of these effects occur above 4 kHz, so they’re not as audible as they might seem from the numbers.

Unlike most of the other screens, the FireHawk worked beautifully when I hung beige drapes to the sides of it and turned on a couple of spotlights in my room. The screen did a great job of maintaining contrast even with a moderate amount of ambient light, while all of the white screens were noticeably washed out in a brighter environment. The FireHawk also intensified the already deep blacks of the JVC projector. When I put it in the black hole, though, I did notice a trace of a hot spot in the center. I also noticed a bit of sheen — bright granules on the screen’s surface. Despite a couple of performance compromises that might turn off purists, I think that for most real-world home theater environments, the FireHawk makes more sense than any of the white screens.

$2,600 (as tested) / stewartfilmscreen.com

Curved Screens: What’s the Angle?

Curved screens were popular back in the days of feeble CRT projectors, where they delivered extra gain for a brighter picture. They’re recently made a comeback — but for reasons many home theater enthusiasts don’t understand. “A lot of people think the curve compensates for distortion caused by 2.35:1 anamorphic lenses, but that’s not true,” says Joaquin Rivera, director of residential sales for Stewart Filmscreen.

According to Rivera, the primary reason for the curve is to maintain better performance for viewers sitting off-axis from the screen’s center. The curve keeps the distance from the lens to the projector consistent — and thus helps the projector deliver brightness more evenly across the screen. It also directs more of the projector’s light at the audience and away from the theater’s side walls. “And some people just like it because it’s sexy,” says Rivera.

There’s no denying the lure of the curve. Rivera says that Stewart’s CineCurve is its most popular screen, despite the fact that an 11-foot-wide model in a solid (unperforated) material lists for $19,500 — or 7.5 times the price of the Stewart screens we reviewed for this article. The CineCurve features an advanced masking system that brings black masking material in from the side to create any aspect ratio you want. (Stewart’s CineV model uses simpler vertical roll-up masking and costs about 30% less.)

Other manufacturers also produce curved screens. Screen Excellence offers the VistaCurve, which is made with the company’s acoustically transparent Enlightor 4K material. Screen Research has a similar product called the TheaterCurve, which uses the company’s THX- and ISF-certified woven material. Da-Lite offers its Curved Series screens, although they’re designed primarily for commercial use.

Despite their cost and complexity, curved screens have become a big hit in custom-installed home theaters. Ultimately, that’s for the same reasons that have made 2.35:1 projection rigs popular: Because they create a more theatrical experience and deliver a sensation you just can’t buy at your local mass-market electronics store.

Curtain Close

After watching countless movies and TV shows on these screens in a variety of lighting environments, I’ve come to the conclusion that achieving great front-projector performance isn’t as much a matter of picking a particular screen as of picking a particular type of screen. I had fun watching all of these, and none of them revealed any flaws that I found bothersome at a normal viewing distance.

For a typical home theater, the Stewart FireHawk G3 is probably the most practical pick among these screens. If sound is especially important to you, you might go with the Screen Research ClearPix2 (or the Screen Excellence Enlightor 4K if you’re planning to go beyond 1080p someday, or the Elite AcousticPro 1080 if you want to save a lot of money). If watching with the lights off gives you the creeps, go with the Screen Innovations Black Diamond. Or if you’re like me and just want the most immersive movie-watching experience possible, then paint everything in your room black and get a Da-Lite JKP Affinity.

Now if you don’t mind, I’d like to return to the black hole . . .